EDITOR'S NOTE -- The Associated Press was recently given extensive access to the largest archive of Nazi concentration camp records, which has been closed for 50 years.

BAD AROLSEN, Germany -- The lists run into the tens of thousands -- men, women and children tossed into the Nazi machinery of death from just one small country, Holland. Most are unknown, lost in the ashes of the Holocaust.

But buried in List No. 40 in a frayed ledger in the world's largest storehouse of documents on Holocaust victims, the name Anne Frank is quickly recognizable.

Today, her diary has made her world famous, but on a day in September 1944 she was just another name -- a terrified teenager herded into a train of cattle cars with 1,018 other Jews, headed east to the concentration camps.

After World War II, the Dutch Red Cross collected the deportation lists from the Westerbork transit camp and sent the names to the International Tracing Service, or ITS, the repository of Nazi papers set up to help trace missing people in the postwar chaos.

More than six decades after the war ended, the International Committee of the Red Cross is due to open the vast ITS archive to survivors, their relatives and to Holocaust researchers for the first time.

Its records on 17.5 million individuals have been used so far only to help unite families, track the fate of millions of displaced people, and later to provide certification supporting compensation claims. Visitors were discouraged.

The files, stored in 16 miles of shelves and cabinet space in this quiet spa town in central Germany, provide the most complete collection of documents that the Nazis kept at their thousands of concentration camps, slave labor centers and extermination grounds.

More archives are scattered around what was once the Third Reich. Each is meant to preserve and commemorate its own corner of wartime agony. Though they share a common purpose, their history of cooperation with each other is spotty, at best.

At ITS, Anne Frank's name appears only once among the 50 million pages of Nazi documents, the archivists say. She is among dozens of Franks on the alphabetized ledger of Westerbork deportations from May 19 to Sept. 6, 1944.

The book-length deportation ledger, compiled by the Red Cross after the war from records seized at Westerbork, sheds no new light on the Anne Frank story. Yet it is still electrifying to scan the endless litany of doomed names and suddenly come across "Frank, Annelies M. / 12.6.29 / A'stm, Merwedeplein 37 / 3.9.44 /."

The entry stands for name, birth date, address in Amsterdam and the date she boarded the train to the concentration camps. The final column, destination, is blank.

"If it's not written, that means Auschwitz," said ITS chief archivist Udo Jost, referring to the death camp in Poland.

Anne, her sister Margot and their parents -- who were not Dutch citizens but German refugees -- were arrested in August 1944 with four other Jews hiding with them in the back of a canal-side warehouse. They were betrayed by an unknown informant.

Anne was 15 years old.

Since the English publication of "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl" in 1952, and its subsequent reprintings as "The Diary of Anne Frank," millions of readers have felt intimately connected to the girl who matured in its pages from innocent childhood into her precocious, sometimes rebellious teens.

The diary pages, scattered in the concealed apartment where the family hid for 25 months, were pieced together by her father -- the family's only survivor -- and would be read by an estimated 30 million people in more than 65 languages.

Anne's last diary entry was on Aug. 1, 1944, three days before the Franks were arrested.

Part of what happened after that is told in the archives of the Dutch Red Cross in The Hague. It has four lists on which her name appears: the roundup list on the day the Frank family was arrested Aug. 4, the list of deportees leaving Amsterdam for Westerbork on Aug. 8, the arrival list at Westerbork of Jews from Amsterdam and Breda on Aug. 8, and the Sept. 3 list of deportees from Westerbork.

Of the 107,000 Jews deported to Germany from the Netherlands, the Red Cross counts only 5,200 survivors. Five times as many Dutch were coerced into the German labor force, and hundreds of thousands of Dutch sympathizers volunteered to serve in the Waffen SS or pro-Nazi Dutch police and paramilitary groups. Some 5,000 died in the service of the Germans.

The Bad Arolsen archive, long closed to the public in part because of privacy issues, is opening up, possibly within a year, because of pressure from survivor groups and from the United States, one of 11 countries that govern the files. The decision was approved last May by representatives of all 11, but only two -- the United States and Israel -- have ratified it.

When they finally gain access, scholars expect it to enrich their perspectives and understanding of the Holocaust.

In one of the gray metal cabinets at Bad Arolsen is a thin manila folder containing a few letters asking the Red Cross for information about Anne and the family, including one from Bernhard Elias -- cousin Buddy -- in Switzerland.

The official records had little information to add.

The final months of Anne's life is known from her father's memoirs, from the few survivors who saw her and from descriptions of camp life.

Historian Harry Paape, writing for the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, says Anne and her sister Margot probably were moved from Auschwitz on Oct. 28 to Bergen-Belsen, which was not a death camp with gas chambers but a concentration camp where inmates often died of disease, hunger and exposure.

Survivor Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper said in an Oscar-winning 1995 documentary that she saw Anne in her last days, ailing and covered with lice. "Anne had thrown away her clothes and she came to us crying, wrapped only in her gray blanket," she said.

Anne and Margot Frank died during a typhus epidemic that swept through Bergen-Belsen from February to April 1945, killing an estimated 35,000 people.

A 1960 Dutch Red Cross document in the manila file cites a death certificate issued by the Amsterdam City Council six years earlier which says she was "presumed dead as of March 31, 1945."

British forces liberated the camp two weeks later.